Just when you thought you heard about the last major scam on Wall Street...

Mark posted a comment on the forum regarding a white paper that discussed how companies are able to scalp a penny, or two, or three from each trade. Basically at no risk. The white paper showed that this is done by "Automated Market Makers" or AMM.

These are computer applications that make the market, where people on the exchange floor (Specialists) use to make the market (or trades). Now programs have algorithms that search out pending trades to inflate prices by pennies, buy it, short it, then drives the stock down. Then the next AMM member comes along and picks it up cheaper, turns around an dumps it and make a penny or two. Really you have to read the white paper to get it all.

The real slap in the face is these computers have to be on the floor of the exchange. Right now it is only at the NYSE. You can thank the SEC ( tradingandmarkets@sec.gov ) and the NYSE again for taking money out of investors pockets.

1. Asset deterioration. A survey by Greenwich Associates found that U.S. investment managers' portfolio assets declined in value by an average 31% in 2008.

2. Mutual fund outflows. Investment Company Institute data on equity mutual funds shows a $25 billion outflow in February and overall redemptions of more than $185 billion since September 2008.

3. Hedge fund redemptions. HedgeFund.net estimates that hedge fund industry assets of $1.724 trillion are 41% lower than their peak in June 2008.

Clearly, the buy and hold, long only equity fund managers have slowed their trading activity. Instead, what we are seeing is high volatility days leading to more high frequency trading and higher volume. In turn, this is confusing traditional investors about the true direction of the market. "

So it sounds like so much volume comes from these AMM trades that volume shoots up, it appears the market is moving up, but really it is a bunch of micro-second round trip trades. This nonsense will make technical analysis even tougher and really steps on the toes of the average investor.

First, maintenance was performed on the site a couple of weeks ago and some of the historical signal data was updated and it was incorrect. There were 97 signals showing on the web site but there should have been 60 based on the results in AMIBroker. This impacted historical trading signals prior to 2007 and more recent signals may have been pushed by 1 day.

Second, one of MTR members, Kevin, discussed in the Forum that he wanted to run some tests using the signals and compare to S&P 500, NASDAQ, and other indexes.

Kevin performed some great work with Excel to check the MTR-TM signals vs. the S&P 500, NASDAQ, and other indexes and emailed the results. It was Kevin's email that prompted us to look at the data and saw the bug with the 97 signals vs. the 60. The trade signals from the MTR-TM did not correlate enough to the movements in the S&P 500 or NASDAQ to make holding ETFs based on the indexes a viable long term strategy using MTR-TM signals. The 4% Model, as with the MTR-TM, main purpose is to determine if overall the market would move higher or lower. Then based on these signals a trader could trade in that direction but it is clear just sitting on ETFs that fit the S&P 500 or NASDAQ 100 would not be the best call.

There was some work already being performed on the MTR-TM formula and the model on the site now represents the updated logic. Looking for a simple strategy to trade these signals it is clear a trader can use an ETF that closely correlates to the Value Line Arithmetic Index such as the S&P 400 MidCap ETF.

We thank Kevin for his work in testing the MTR signals vs. other indexes. This helped to uncover a data issue on the web site and prompted additional research as to better trading methods using the MTR-TM signals.